The 21 most innovative startups in tech

In a world where there's 30 plus food delivery companies and an army of 'Uber for X' clones, startups working on high impact and daring ideas can be overlooked. But that doesn't mean they're not out there.

We polled investors and entrepreneurs to hear what audacious ideas companies are working. Here are 21 companies will go big, or go broke trying.

We limited the list to private companies who have raised money in the last five years, so this excludes big projects like Google's Loon or Tesla's world takeover. Think we missed some? Leave your nominations in the comments.

Orbital Insight wants to change what we know about the world, by viewing it from above.

Orbital Insight

What is it: When retailers missed their estimates in the last quarter, Orbital Insight already knew about it. The mostly-in-stealth startup had been analyzing imagery from satellites and noticed one striking thing comparing year-over-year images: there's fewer cars in parking lots.

That's just one example of the power of looking down on our Earth rather than only at what you can see out your window. Orbital Insight wants to understand the trends of the world by taking advantage of data science and machine learning to spot when change is happening.

Diamond Foundry is growing diamonds.

Diamond Foundry

What it is: The startup, which launched publicly in November, claims it can grow hundreds of diamonds that are up to nine carats in just two weeks in a lab. The company had been working for three years to come up with a way to lab-grow pure diamonds, not synthetics. The company says it discovered a plasma that allows atoms to attach themselves to the thin slice of Earth-extracted diamond. The atoms then stack on top of that natural diamond, layer by layer, until a pure, jewelry-grade diamond is formed.

Fetch Robotics wants to create robots that helpfully work with humans.

What is it: Described as the most prominent robotics company not to be owned by Google, Fetch Robotics wants to change the way warehouses work. Unlike other companies, though, the future with Fetch Robotics doesn't have to eliminate the human entirely. Instead, what investors like about Fetch is how it weaves the two seamlessly together.

Fetch has created both a pick robot and a freight one. While the "Fetch" can grab items off shelves, a warehouse doesn't need to go all-in on robots to take advantage of their efficiency. The new "Freight" robot acts more like a trained dog, steadfastly sticking to either a human or another robot's side. So a worker (or the Fetch itself) pulls item off a shelf and adds it to the Freight's bin. Once it's full, it returns to the shipping area and a new robot is automatically dispatched.

InVenture wants to give a financial identity to the 2.5 billion people without one.

Inventure

What is it: In the US, people give a lot of power to your credit score. Whether you can buy a house, rent an apartment, or get a good deal on a car often depends on what credit monitoring institutions have deemed as your creditworthiness.

Yet for people who don't live in a financial system that tracks you over several years, securing a loan can be hard — no credit score, no loan.

Santa Monica-based InVenture wants to solve it by taking a look at the person as a whole, rather than assigning a strict number. The company has launched apps in Kenya that track how a person is spending money and how much is coming in. InVenture also looks at more than 10,000 points — a person whose phone calls last more than four minutes might have stronger relationships, therefore may be more credit-worthy.

It's worked so far – the company boasts an 85 percent repayment rate and a 75 percent repeat rate among its first customers, according to FastCompany.

Hooked wants to be the next YouTube and inspire a new generation of fiction designed for the Snapchat generation.

Hooked

What is it: Hooked wants to challenge YouTube and bring stories into a mobile world. It publishes voyeuristic yet gripping text-message style conversations that keep you hitting next to find out.

Founder and CEO Prerna Gupta likens Hooked to the invention of the camera. At first, Hollywood filmed plays that were written for theater stages and turned into movies. But soon, filmmakers started developing movies fit for the big screen.

Gupta believes the same thing is going to happen in narrative. Amazon's Kindle app or communities like Wattpad have brought books onto mobile devices, but no one has really mastered creating narrative in a new form, native to mobile and designed to capture a person's short attention span.

Blippar wants to be bigger than Google and overhaul search with augmented reality.

Ambarish Mitra, CEO and co-founder of BlipparAmbarish Mitra

What is it: Blippar's CEO and founder Ambarish Mitra says he'll never sell to Google or Microsoft. Why? Because he believes what he's trying to make "is bigger than the internet itself."

Blippar is best known for its augmented reality app primarily used by advertisers. A cereal box or a juice bottle can come to life with the camera's phone trained on it. For advertisers, it's a neat trick they can put on products.

Mitra's vision doesn't stop there, though. He wants to turn the world into a searchable database. Holding your phone up to an orange could provide a listing to a local store, its Wikipedia page for more information, or a website with recipes. Mitra wants to reinvent search in the real world — and he's audacious enough to give it a good shot.

Carbon3D wants to change manufacturing, from transportation to health care.

Carbon3D

What is it: Carbon3D grabbed headlines and attention for its method of seemingly creating shapes out of a liquid resin soup.

It's much more complicated than that, but Carbon3D has caught the eye of everyone from Ford to Johnson & Johnson. While Ford imagines a future of speedy customizable parts, like custom designed cup holders, healthcare operators are looking at Carbon3D for a fast way to create surgical parts.

Funding: $141 million from firms including Google Ventures and Sequoia

Sano wants to eliminate the finger prick and find a noninvasive way to track your metabolism.

Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla

What is it: Diabetes patients have to rely on finger pricking multiple times a day to keep their glucose levels in range. Sano wants to eliminate the need entirely.

Still largely in stealth, the four-year-old startup is rumored to be working on a noninvasive patch that monitors your metabolic levels, like blood glucose. It's not designed only for patients with diabetes, and instead, Sano wants to open up health tracking to the masses.

A large lunch can spike your glucose levels leaving you feeling sluggish, said its founder Ashwin Pushpala in an interview with TechCrunch. Knowing how much glucose tips you into that sluggish feeling versus just giving you a boost can help anyone make more informed decisions about when and what to eat.

Hyperloop Technologies wants to levitate people in tubes to change the way we travel.

What is it: First conceived by Elon Musk in 2013, the Hyperloop might be the next train — or the next futuristic flop. Either way, startups are making a go of it.

The idea behind the hyperloop is similar to a pneumatic tube, the thing used to send mail between buildings or to send checks to bank tellers from the drive-thru. By creating a special environment inside a sealed tube, the pod could move quickly between locations but at a fraction of the energy needed to power traditional transportation like trains or planes.

From the creators of Siri, Viv wants to be the personal assistant that wants to listen to you.

YouTube/Apple

What is it: Viv wants to build an AI that will do anything you ask.

Its founders, including Adam Cheyer, Dag Kittlaus, and Chris Brigham, were the team originally behind Apple's Siri. Siri's limitations are pretty clear, though — it can't do much beyond pull up weather, read osports scores, or give you directions.

Globality wants to change how companies do business in the 21st century.

Reuters / Mike Segar

What is it: Globality wants to change way companies do business around the globe by "Combining A.I. with domain expertise."

In an interview with TechCrunch, cofounder Joel Hyatt was both extremely vague and ambitious about its plans to change the world's economic structure. "We’re going to facilitate global trade on the part of far more companies than are currently involved in exporting both goods and services, which are critical to the U.S. economy and critical to the GDP. The vast 90 percent of export comes from one percent of companies, these large industrial conglomerates and international service firms," Hyatt told TechCrunch.

Nuritas wants to unlock food's secrets and find new ingredients.

What is it: Based in Ireland, Nuritas is creating controversial waves in the food scene by combining artificial intelligence with molecular biology.

Nuritas is building a food database to identify peptides — certain types of molecules in food products — that could be used as supplements or new ingredients.

This isn't just adding protein powder to a shake. Instead, Nuritas is identifying various peptides that can change how a food reacts to the body. For example, in an interview with Tech Europe, its cofounder Dr. Nora Khaldi envisioned a cereal bar designed to control Type 2 diabetes, or a cream with added anti-aging ingredients discovered by the company.

Magic Leap wants to boost our real environment with cinematic wonder.

Magic Leap

What is it: Magic Leap is one of tech's biggest mysteries. The Florida-based company has raised hundreds of millions — and no one is quite sure for what. Magic Leap is working on building "cinematic reality," an augmented reality environment where it looks like a monster can walk on your hands or an elephant can spring out of them.

"Click’s disruptive technology has tremendous potential in developing nations to change the paradigm of care for prominent and widespread infectious diseases (e.g. Tuberculosis and drug-resistant TB) and pandemics (e.g. Swine flu, avian flue, Ebola). Since the Click device is an easy to use, portable, rapid, disposable, and instrument-free diagnostic tool, it can easily be used in remote villages, small towns and large cities alike," the company describes.

Brigade wants to repair democracy...with an app.

AP Photo/Paul Sakuma

What is it: It's an election year, and Brigade is facing its make or break moment. In a bold attempt to try to engage a milennial class in politics, Brigade turns political discussions into an app. Instead of unfriending your high school classmates on Facebook because of their political view points, Brigade tries to identify friends or neighbors that you're most similar to so you can team up to sign petitions or champion causes you are passionate about.

It's earned the nickname "a Tinder for politics."

But Brigade wants to do more than have its users hit agree or disagree on important issues. The company used interactive voting guides to draw in millennials into local politics. Its users opinions on a local San Francisco election accurately reflected (with one exception) how the voter base ended up voting in the polls.

Eero wants to fix everything that's wrong about your wi-fi.

Eero

What it is: There's nothing worse than having choppy Wi-Fi throughout your apartment. That's the problem Eero is trying to solve. Eero's devices are little white pods that use Bluetooth and mesh networking to connect and extend the Wi-Fi in your home.

When you buy three — that's how many Eero says a typical home needs — you'll connect the first to your modem, and the others get plugged in to power outlets. The devices connect to one another through internal radios. Eero's devices are available for preorder now — you can get one for $199 or three for $499. Its devices are slated to ship by February 2016.

What is it: While most people think of a printer as just ink and paper, the Glowforge laser 3D printer will do way more than print your everyday document.

The Glowforge broke crowdfunding records in late 2015 when it raised more than $27 million to produce its printer. While the company calls it a 3D laser printer, it's actually more of a compact laser engraver and cutter. Whereas a 3D printer builds things up layer by layer, the Glowforge users lasers to whittle it down into shape.

The printer only has so much space, so you can't go crazy engraving wine bottles, for instance, but every day objects like wood cut outs, invitations, or board game pieces can be customized.

Most importantly, it's taking a normally dangerous tech (you can't play with laser beams just anywhere) and turning it into something that an average person can use in a space the size of your desktop printer — no special workshop required to unlock laser production.

Keep an eye out for Glowforge in 2016. Its first units to Kickstarter backers are expected to ship in the first half of 2016, followed by all other pre-sale orders in Q3 and beyond.

Funding: $37.91 million, including a Series A led round by Foundry Group in May 2015 and a $27 million round from Kickstarter in October 2015.

Uber wants to make transportation as reliable as running water.

Thomson Reuters

What is it: Don't let Uber's black car origins fool you.

While Uber is probably the most well-known startup out there, it continues to be the most innovative. The company has gone from black cars to changing the commuter carpool to building its own version of self-driving cars.

And that's just on the transit side.

The ride-hailing company is also solidifying itself as a logistics network with UberRUSH and a food delivery company with UberEATS. If we want to talk innovation, there's also the ongoing discussion, spurred by Uber's use of independent contractors, on what the future of the "gig" economy.